The commission staff also suggested that resources need to be targeted to ongoing monitoring of the safety of Gulf seafood and for marketing efforts to promote Gulf seafood and tourism in the wake of the disaster, and that in future large-scale spills, efforts to restore consumer confidence in damaged sectors of the economy ought to be considered an "appropriate place to allocate funding when calculating fines and settlements."

``The spill created unprecedented and unforeseen issues that the current regulatory framework for compensation is not equipped to deal with," said Kate Clark, a senior analyst for the commission.

The staff reports on a range of topics, from the causes of the blowout of the Macondo well to the response, impacts and implications for changes in the way industry and government goes about energy exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, have been the subject of the last two days of formal meetings of the commission, which is due to report its findings and recommendations to President Barack Obama on Jan. 11.

While the commission has found plenty of fault with BP and its contractors, Transocean and Hailliburton in the events leading up to the April 20 blowout, members of the commission noted that the aftermath could have been much worse for those damaged by the spill if the responsible party had been, as Commissioner Terry Garcia put it, "Acme oil," instead of a company with the very deep pockets of BP.

"We have to keep in mind, where would be if this were not BP," said Garcia.

"it's a happy anomaly that this perpetrator has been one of the wealthiest companies in the world," said former Florida Senator and Governer Bob Graham, the co-chair of the commission.

The commissioners noted that BP has committed substantial resources, including voluntary commitments of $20 billion in an escrow fund to cover, among other things, claims being made to the Gulf Coat Claims Facility being administered by Kenneth Feinberg, and $500 million for independent research into the impacts of the spill, and that that might not be the case in a future spill with a less financially capable responsible party.

For that reason, the commission feels it is incumbent to develop strategies for future disasters that do not count on the guilty party being a financial behemoth on the order of BP. For that reason, Garcia, an executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, said it is important that a company's ability to pay for any potential damage it might cause needs to be addressed upfront before they get the go-ahead to drill.

The commission staff said that in the future there has to be greater readily available funding and protocols for research into a spill.

Clark said National Science Foundation grants were the only ones quickly available, and that money ran out quickly. And, so far, she said, only $40 million of the $500 million in BP research funding has been distributed, as governors of the Gulf States sought to have a role in how that money was distributed. She said she expected requests for proposals for that research money to go out shortly.

On the human health issues, the commission staff noted that "given the scale of the response and the need to enlist local help, many response workers were not screened for pre-existing conditions before being put to work."

Without pre-screening, Clark said, there is no baseline in considering health complaints from individuals claiming adverse effects of working in the cleanup.

Further, Clark said that there was not adequate funding in place to deal with claims of physical and mental illness among people on the Gulf Coast, and "whether or not the health concerns are warranted, does not change the perception among some that government is not responsive to such claims."

Members of the commission said they all had first-hand experience talking to people in the Gulf who said they were suffering physical and mental consequences in the wake of the spill.

"These impacts are far more than economic, it's affected the social structure in very troubling ways, affected families in more ways than dollars and cents," said Commissioner Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and a Louisiana native.

Another commissioner, Francis Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that concerns about exposure to oil and dispersants were a part of "every discussion we had in the Gulf." And she said, the oil disaster, piled upon the previous trauma of Hurricane Katrina, appeared to have had a "long-lasting affect on the psyche of the folks that live there."